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Talk:He Who Drew the Flames/@comment-6548012-20160310122412
If this is your first pasta, I'm impressed, the writing is pretty good. But I have a few issues with it, because, otherwise, it wouldn't be fun, so let's start with the more mundane mistakes such as the minor lack of apostrophe on “warriors l. 9,” and the lack of capitalization on the word “knight.” It shouldn't be on every instance of the word, but when you're addressing the character directly, it's better to capitalize it. And also, a little nitpick: “Dressed in gleaming metal, the armor of the men clanked as they jumped off their horses.” The way you phrase this, you're saying that the armor is dressed in gleaming metal, and not referring to the men. So a correct way to do it would be “Dressed in gleaming metal, the men jumped off their horses.” Now, I have a problem with the vocabulary. You use a very varied vocabulary and you have a tendency to go very far with your words, and that's great, really, do more of that, I like this aspect of poetry in there, if you could have a few more fitting figures of speech, that would even add to the epic character of this pasta. But! You are also limited in your words, and when you don't find a good synonym, you just reuse the same thing, which is bad, because if you're gonna have a style orientated towards epicness, you have to change the wording of your phrase in order to evade this dead end, not run right into it, and you also need to be sure of the strength of your words, because you don't want to create something anticlimatic; let's take an example. “Slowly, the lesser knight gently put the torch on a hay stock. The flames greeted and consumed the bale of hay.” Just before that, we have an army in shining armor marching towards their objective, something strong, and then you have a knight just sitting there, taking his time, being all smooth and gentle, to then come back to flames, aggressiveness, creating tension! It would work really well if you kept surfing on the wave of brutality, on the wave of, well, tension, because that is the whole point of a creepypasta. Speaking of which, you go real fast, and that's a prowess; even though the pasta is pretty long, you still manage to make it go relatively fast. Well, not the reading, but the action, now that I come to think of it more, it feels like it lasted almost no time, and if you can do that, you can write something scary. But if there's something you can't write here, it's dialogues. They do not feel human, they're bland, it makes the characters very uninteresting. I can understand that you make mistakes, it's supposed to be chronologically situated in, what, the Middle Ages? So, I'm not asking for a lot of character development, but you've set up your story in a manner in which the focus is the interaction between these folk, so you'll have to do something about that. About that, who are these folk? I have absolutely no problem with starting your story in the middle of something, but it's losing the reader after the second sentence? I don't think I have to know who she is, but I wouldn't mind about understanding what the knight is all about, and also, the warden may want to deliver his secrets if he wants me to care about his death. All in all, this pasta is all about uncertainty, and, surprisingly enough, its flaws make it a metaphor of itself. The writing of the pasta is as uncertain as its characters. But if we want to keep calling it a creepypasta, we'll have to change that, sadly, so let's take a minute for the unwanted and short brilliance of this figure. Now that's out of the way, you need to take a specific approach. It's not a set approach, but you need to be more precise about the way you're saying things, and also about what you are saying. The epic character of the pasta is really good, but it's pretty much nulled by the bland character interactions. This confuses the reader, because the reader won't know how they're supposed to read that. Personally, I had two lectures. One moment I was imagining that it was an epic retelling of the story by a man who supposedly witnessed it and is warning whomever listens even though it is very likely that he just invented it all by himself in his dementia, dementia that might also be given to the knight who may be seeing things, or maybe the knight and the narrator are one and the same, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe. Lots of choices to make and paths to take to get to the end of it, this lecture is philosophical, its epic, its poetic, it has everything. But this lecture was cut by the other way I was reading this, as the actual moment was happening in front of us, that the narrator is not important and just there to say cool shit whilst the action is going on. This makes the narration not matter too much (even though it's the narrator that tells the action, I don't know how you did that, but you did it,) and having the actual thing happen may be the best approach to actually make it creepy, I don't know. But for sure, the two mixed in at the same time is a terrible idea. In conclusion, your outline is great, you do have the talent, but you need to start over from the very basic elements. And I feel like, right now, an introduction to what's happening would be great, and less confusing. So, I don't know if my interpretation is any close to what you intended, if I'm missing anything or if you have anything to add, tell me, I'd really like to know what goes through your head when thinking about it, and keep writing, this has a lot of potential. Sorry for the length.